1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and products for delayed deletion of extended attributes associated with a file in a file system.
2. Description of Related Art
Extended attributes are name-value pairs associated with files and directories and typically containing information about the associated file. Extended attributes often provide additional functionality to the use of files in a file system. One advantage of using extended attributes is that the information stored in the extended attribute is stored outside of the file contents themselves. That is, the extended attribute separates its information about the file from the file information itself. Extended attributes are often application-specific or user-specific extensions to the normal attributes which are associated with the file representations in a file system such as, for example, an inode in an Enhanced Journaled File System (“JFS2”) available in the AIX™ operating system.
With the increased use of extended attributes in many systems such as, for example, Portable Operating System Interface (“POSIX”) and Network File System version 4 Protocol (“NFSv4”) many files have associated with them an extensive tree of extended attributes. Recursively deleting these extended attributes, through for example, an unlink operation in Unix systems can be cumbersome and result in perceived performance degradation. There is therefore a need for improved deletion of extended attributes associated with a file in a file system that operates transparently to users and foreground processes.